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Excuse my shouty capitals, but this is a post that I feel very strongly about.

Our baby-cat Barney spent a couple of days in the kitty hospital over the weekend after coming into contact with a bunch of lillies. I had been given them as a gift and had a vague idea that they were harmful to cats so put them somewhere which I thought was out of the little one’s reach. I came home from work on Friday to find a big orange smudge on his head. It took me a while to work out what it was, but when I did finally connect it up to the lilly pollen, I thought I’d better call the vets for a bit of advice. I was shocked to be told to bring him straight in. They admitted him and kept him on a drip for 24 hours.

So what are the facts about cats and lillies?

1 – All parts of the lilly flower and plant are poisonous to cats, including the leaves, petals and pollen.

2 – After a cat ingests lilly toxin, they can develop acute kidney failure and die within 3-6 days

3 – Without prompt treatment, most cats who come into contact with lillies die, or need to be put down.

4 – If a poisoned cat receives treatment from a vet within 18 hours, most will recover

Early signs of contact with lillies include vomiting, increased thirst, loss of appetite and lethargy.

I have learnt a valuable lesson and there needs to be more awareness of the risk these beautiful and common flowers pose to our feline friends, so please help me spread the word. Tell your friends, don’t buy lillies for anyone who owns a cat, and get your cat to a vet if they show any of the symptoms listed above.

It’s now just less that five weeks until the wedding, I’ve been keeping my head down and getting on with things for the last little while, hence my blogging absence. Luckily I seem to have turned a corner and all of the stress of the planning and organising has given way to gleeful excitement!

We move to our lovely new home on Saturday, the new kitten Barney is well and truly part of the family, and everything feels right with the world. There is still plenty to do. The dress is coming on in leaps and bounds but is still very much a work in progress, my vows need writing, I haven’t even started on the buttonholes yet, and lets not talk about all the packing that I haven’t done.

I’ve got my old, new, borrowed and blue, and most importantly I feel comfortable and confident in the step Mr Monster and I are taking. He’s been away for a few days and despite being the kind of girl who enjoys her own company, I’ve felt utterly lost without him. I’m expecting him home in a few hours and I’m so excited to see him, that’s got to be a good basis for a marriage I reckon!

You may remember a while back, Mr Monster and I introduced a new kitten to the household. It was a tense few days waiting to see if our one year old cat Tilly would bond with him, but looking at what we woke up to one morning this week, we needn’t have worried.

This is Tilly’s spot on the windowsill, and I love how she’s only let him get is front paws on her cushion with his back paws on the hard wooden sill. We wouldn’t want him getting too comfortable now would we!

…paws not claws became the mantra in the monster household this weekend as we welcomed a new kitten to the family.

As you may have seen in an earlier post, we lost our beloved cat Lori a few weeks ago. She was a special cat and totally irreplaceable, so we were adamant that we weren’t going to get another. Our other little girl Tilly has never been alone. We took her from her brothers at eight weeks old, she came home with us and bonded with Lori straight away becoming best friends and partners in crime. Seeing her lost and lonely without Lori was breaking my heart. She looked everywhere for her, and when she couldn’t find her would mew with such sadness. She would bring her favourite ball to us at 3am wanting the play and we would wake up with her curled up between us on the bed. I tried to be patient and I’m sure that eventually she would have adjusted to being on her own, but on Saturday morning I broke down.

Mr Monster, being the kind of chap that he is, made the decision that a new kitten was the only solution for all of us so we got online and found this little bundle.

Meet Barney. So far, we know that he is ten weeks old, has a beautiful little purr, is daft as a brush, and loves to be cuddled. He will eat anything and keeps trying to steal food from our plates and from Tilly’s bowl. His mews sound like he is on helium, and he can jump like no cat I’ve ever seen.

We did lots of research on introducing kittens to older cats and knew that it wouldn’t be a walk in the park but I have to say, it’s been a pretty smooth process. Tilly is a very sociable and playful cat and after the initial little bit of hissing and hiding, she is now accepting the new arrival and starting to join him in playtime. She’s done us proud and is back to her old self again. When we first bought Barney home, we did have a moment of ‘did we do he right thing’, but we now know that we absolutely did, and our family is starting to feel a little bit more complete.

Lori will never be forgotten, in fact Barney is already starting to show some Lori-isms, and is breathing new life into some of the toys she loved when she was a kitten which is reminding us of happy times.

I think I need to come to terms with the fact that I am, and always will be a cat lady!

Yesterday, Andy (Mr Monster) and I had our first real tragedy to deal with as a couple. Our beloved cat Lori died very suddenly, and it broke our hearts.

I will spare you the dramatic details of her passing, but will just say that she suffered a stroke at home, the stress of being transported to the vets bought on a heart attack and she died in Andy’s arms. Of course in the last day and a half we have gone through every emotion imaginable, from shock, to guilt, to anger and ultimately to shattering sadness.

Until having pets of my own, I never really understood the depth of love which a person can feel for an animal, and had this happened to someone I knew before experiencing pet ownership I would have taken the stance of ‘yes, that’s very sad, but it’s just a cat’. I now know that it is never JUST an animal. Pets become so much part of your life and of who you are, that the grief of loosing them is very real indeed.

Lori could never be described as just a cat. She was the first pet that either Andy or I had owned as an adult, and was symbolic of our commitment to one another in the early stages of our relationship. She was our baby, and when we first bought her home we were like nervous and clueless first time parents, bonding through shared learning of how to care for this little life. We grew her from a tiny wee 8 week old energetic fur-ball, into an elegant and beautiful 15 month old cat.

Her name was Lorelei, named after my favourite Marilyn Monroe role, as in my eyes she was as stunning as the lady herself. We called her Lori for short and she was also known by many silly nick-names including Loricopter, and Lori-pops; the latter spawned her very own theme song which we used to sing to her, to the tune of the song ‘Lollipop’. She had a calm and loving temperament and was a true Daddy’s girl. She was like a little shadow to Andy and would follow him around the flat. If he went into the bathroom she would sit by the door patiently waiting for him to come back out, and her favourite place to sleep was on his chest, in our bed. She would sit with me when I was sad, and would even sometimes perch on the back of the sofa and groom my hair.

She left us too soon, but we are now trying to focus on giving as much love as we can to Tilly, our other cherished kitty who we got as a companion for Lori after we’d had her for four weeks. They were thick as thieves, played together, slept together, and had a good healthy line in rough-and-tumble together. Watching Tilly look lost without her is almost as painful as having lost Lori. She has looked everywhere for her and she keeps thinking she hears her claws on the wood floor and pricking her ears up and craning to see where she is. I have spent the day cuddling her and playing with her as much as I can and I’m sure she will get used to things being different in time.

Andy and I were overwhelmed yesterday by the support we received from our families and friends in light of the traumatic and sudden way everything happened. Everyone rallied round with messages of support and lots of people came forward to keep us busy and distracted for the day which was exactly what we needed. Thank you to everyone for that. I think it was clear for all to see just how much we loved her.

I wanted to do a gallery of some of my favourite photos of her, but having written this I am now finding searching through pictures to be too painful. I will instead just leave you with our favourite picture of Lori, taken on her first birthday. The pose was one which she could often be found in at random locations around the flat and which made me chuckle every time. Goodbye my little Lori-pops, and sleep well.